Shot Scope LM1 Review: What Our Test Revealed

They say that perception is reality. But if your perception is that you hit your 7-iron 160 yards, and you really only hit it 148 yards, then penalty strokes are your reality.

So I jotted down my own perceived distances with every club, then took Shot Scope’s new $199 launch monitor, the LM1, to the range to find out how far I really hit every club in my bag. 

The results were eye-opening. They’ll also save me strokes.

Before I tossed my clubs into my trunk, I grabbed a Sharpie and wrote down what I thought my distances with every club were. These are the stock numbers I’d be basing decisions on if I were headed to the golf course, not the driving range.

Here they are:

I should also point out that this was my first time hitting golf balls outdoors in about five months. I’ve hit balls indoors over the winter, but this was my first time taking a divot or seeing a ball fly through the air of the year. 

After all, your distances aren’t a fixed number. They’re a snapshot of where your game is right now. Today’s cold, wind, and five months of rust tell a different story than a warm, July afternoon when you’re striking it clean.

I took the Shot Scope LM1 to the driving range and hit four or five balls per club with 12 different clubs, from my 58-degree wedge through driver – 73 shots total. For each shot, the LM1 displays club speed, ball speed, smash factor, carry distance and total distance instantly on its 3.5” screen.

One thing worth noting is that the LM1 doesn’t currently allow you to delete individual shots from a session in the app. That’s a big detail, because beyond simply wanting to remove a few bad shots from my averages, I had a couple mis-reads that skewed averages. 

One obvious mis-read was an 8-iron shot that registered at 26.1 MPH of club speed and 19 yards of carry. My guess is the LM1 read my divot. A device designed for practical range use needs an in-app delete function, full stop. And for what it’s worth, there’s no way to delete shots directly off the unit, either.

I found two significant mis-reads like this (based on swing speed). It’s a very small percentage, but if you like the idea of using the LM1 as a pre-round warm-up tool, those misreads make a big difference.

Some of it confirmed my suspicions. Some of it genuinely surprised me.

In some cases, my actual distances were nowhere near my “stock” yardages that I would have assumed on the golf course. 

But it’s not that I was wrong that was surprising. It’s that in some cases my actual shots came up way short of my stock distance, and in other cases they flew way long. I was all over the place.

The pattern was telling, too. With my wedges – the clubs I rely on into and around the greens – I was overestimating my distances by 10 to 20 yards. These distances were the most sensitive to mis-hits and wind, and that’s exactly why I can’t wait to use the LM1 before a live round. Being equipped with that information before I tee it up, rather than figuring it out on the fly, can really show up on the scorecard.

I take comfort in knowing that stock distances with my irons are pretty dialed in. And my longer clubs? It was the exact opposite. Even my less-than-pure strikes exceeded my expectations.

But the point isn’t which clubs I was right about and which ones I was wrong. The point is I used to think, now I know.

The Shot Scope LM1 does four things incredibly well: it’s affordable, the user experience is foolproof, it gives just the right amount of feedback, and it’s dead accurate.

If you don’t believe me, here’s proof: LM1 sold out on launch day and is currently back ordered eight weeks (through the end of May).

During my range session I hit a barrel on the fly downrange. The LM1 told me the carry distance was 82 yards, and I knew this was my opportunity to put that number to the test, so I pulled out my rangefinder and shot the barrel: 81 yards. Pretty darn good if you ask me.

Since the LM1 works as a standalone unit, you can take it out of your golf bag and be hitting shots with data within about 20 seconds. Sync it with the Shot Scope app later if you’d like, or don’t.

I’ve had other launch monitors that I’ve taken to the range, but connecting to an app on a driving range always turns out to be more complicated than it should be, and it’s one hurdle too many for me.

My only real gripes with the LM1 were the couple of mis-reads I saw during my testing, and the inability to delete shots from session data. Even if Shot Scope can add the delete feature later on, that would make one or two mis-reads per range session inconsequential.

I honestly can’t wait to use the LM1 during a pre-round warm up and see if I can use that information to make better decisions on the course. And that alone is worth Shot Scope’s $199 asking price, in my opinion.